The Special Crook
THE SPECIAL CROOK
Another relevant personality type attracted to tariqats which are otherwise sound and honourable are that sub-species of conmen which can only prey on easier game, the lambs of religion. Taking full advantage of sheikhs’ unquestioning hospitality these insinuate themselves into a sheikh’s circle and lead an easy life of free meals and accommodation plus the occasional big kill in the form of large monetary handouts to implement some imaginary lucrative or pious projects. Because these conmen are informed by fraudulent motives and ambitions they are most wary of any sincere and talented disciples whom they variously shun or try to subvert. As such they pose a real threat to all concerned and, ideally speaking, should have no place in a tariqat. Still, some sheikhs have enough power to control them and may have good reasons for retaining them ‘a la Khidr’. Like good entomologists they can handle and put to good use even those most dangerous ticks and scorpions of men.
NOW, WHO KEEPS HIS PROMISES AND FULFILS HIS TRUSTEESHIP DUTIES
Only the first type of personality we studied above has the capacity to consistently keep promises and fulfil trusteeship obligations. The first and overarching trust imposed on man is referred to in the verse:
“We have offered the Trust to the heavens and the earth and the mountains and all declined and took fright of it while man took it up. Since, however, he has been grossly wrongdoing as he was grossly ignorant. This in order Allah to punish the men and women hypocrites and men and women polytheists and to turn to with grace and forgiveness to believing men and believing women. Allah has always been mercifully forgiving (33: 72- 73).
Here we are: In the main, most men ended up either as polytheists (worshipping or serving a multitude of false and fraudulent values embodied in legends and tangible figures) or hypocrites embedded in the body of a God-worshipping community; both of these types are only ruining themselves without realising. A third group however is the rightly guided body; only these are out to win the approval of and rewards from God while punishment awaits the former two. The reason why the punished end up punished is that, like the saved party, they also bid for the trusteeship of Allah, that is to say accepting the gift of intelligence and creativity from Allah which enabled them to almost play God to other creatures, but they abused it. Then like all abusive souls they deserved punishment in the Hands of the Supreme Authority in charge of all existence. For their part, the sincere believers tried their best but at times failed out of weakness or unintended ignorance- these Allah will pardon and also reward.
What observing Allah’s trusts or obeying him correctly is can be seen from a quotation of the 1st to 8th verses of the Surat al Mu’minun:
“Indeed the believers are saved, namely those who attend their prayers in awed devotion, those who turn away from idle and irrelevant diversions, those who pay up zakat (the prescribed contribution to their poorer fellow believers), those who protect their private parts except in the case of their lawful spouses and any concubines they own in which case no blame attaches to them. Accordingly, whoever seeks more than this are offenders; and those who observe their trusts, keep their promises and honour their obligations”.
The things we are entrusted with can be anything and everything. At the one end and the higher are those obligations we are charged with by Allah as His deputies on earth: they include caring for all life and the ecological environment sustaining it and not degrading that priceless and alternativeless environment by our abusing and polluting activities like excessive exploitation and consumption of the resources in it like combustible materials or depositing in it excessive amounts of non-biodegradable refuse, both industrial and domestic. Wanton overhunting of other animals with barbarous methods for mostly wanton reasons is another form of betraying Allah’s trusts. They are like over-fishing with the use of destructive methods like using dynamite and trawling or massacring rhinos and tigers for a small part of supposedly medicinally useful parts or minks etc for their ‘luxury’ furs. All animals and plants are at our mercy and we should be merciful towards them; what is the difference between racial prejudice whereby we victimise those of a different race and the ‘species prejudice’ whereby we feel free to do anything to an animal simply because it is not a human-being?
Who is saved from such barbaric tendencies? Why, are not they those who enough internalise a correct concept of Allah and celebrate and worship Him in their hearts? To know what I mean let me tell you a little Sufi anecdote: Abu Yazid al Bistami, one of our Naqshibandi masters was seen squatting and talking to an ant which he had accidentally hurt by stepping on it lightly. While the little fellow was struggling to recover our sheikh was talking to it in the following words “O little servant of Allah, please forgive me and do not sue me in the Divine Court on the Day of Judgment”. How can such a God-filled man could fell that magnificent giant of an animal a black rhinoceros just to cut out its horn in order to sell it for an aphrodisiac to prurient godless men knowing nothing better than sex to fill their lives with? How could those Medieval barbarous Mongols lay to waste half of the world and massacre indiscriminately millions of fellow humans had they been aware and appreciative of God and even more tellingly how could those modern and extremely well-educated and aesthetically cultivated Nazi Germans exterminate like pests millions of Jews and Slavs whom they detested as sub-humans, had those Germans had a milligram of Christian Godliness in them? Had not all betrayed Allah’s Trust and thereby proven themselves to be ‘grossly wrongdoing as grossly (spiritual) ignorant’?
LESSON FOR OUR DOWN-TO-EARTH AND HERE AND NOW
Dear reader, I hope by now you understand that spiritual reality is as uncheatable as the physical. Crooks may dazzle and rob for nothing and stage magicians may pull rabbits from hats but as everybody knows they may be rabbits (sometimes they aren’t but brilliant imitations) but on further investigation they are exposed, as faked, and in the case of the crook also punished. Now I wonder, after reading all the above, who in his right mind and with his hand on his heart will not begin to inspect all his motives and scrutinise his behaviour and see whether he is being a trustworthy person in all his dealings the simplest and most frequent of which is giving and keeping a promise. If you fail in this all the rest are also compromised and endangered. For example, if you cheat on a promise you may also cheat on money or sex and all the rest. You see, we cannot be two different characters depending on the occasion and context; if you cheat in one area it is highly likely that you will cheat in other areas, at least when the promise is delicious and the temptation strong enough. It was on this basis that enemies seduced princes to rise in rebellion and depose their royal fathers or a brother already on the throne. Many did the dastardly act and then shamelessly wept over the body of their victim. Such is this world’s spell on its worshippers. Similarly royal fathers killed sons they feared would betray them or ‘just in case. Can you believe it, it is even on record that queens killed their royal husbands or princely sons in collaboration with their lovers and then moved to rule together with an uncertain future for each; sometimes the queen disposed of the new king she had created or other way round.
If you want to avoid such impious stoopings and instead advance and refine yourself on the spiritual path, begin with and make sure you only give promises you can deliver and then deliver them unless overwhelmed by circumstances beyond your control. In that case explain and apologise and vow to make up any deficit you caused if you possibly can. In brief be reliable like a rock, at all times at all places. The Messenger of Allah was so reliable that even before he was a prophet he was called ‘al Amin’, the Trustworthy.
THE MAGNIFICENT VIEW
Suppose you saw the following dream: It is a very pleasant and peaceful day and you are on a lush green plain richly populated and magnificently embellished by innumerable trees and smaller plants swarming with all sorts of beautiful insects, musical and glamorous birds together with leisurely roaming and occasionally playful animals. For a time you think that there could not be a better world to witness and enjoy than what you are seeing. Then you notice a very big and high hill which ascends not steeply but very gradually until a truly high summit shooting through a thin cloud-line looks scratching the blue sky. You feel exceptionally well and almost on top of the world. “Why not climb that summit and have a better and fuller view of this paradise of a world?” you wonder. And sure enough, without even realising, your legs begin to move and move with incredible desire and vitality. Soon you are halfway up the summit and the scenery has already exploded tenfold. Before you lies a distant ocean extending to almost an infinity where it joins the skirts of the heavens. But you keep pressing upwards and, having lost all sense of time you are at the very summit watching the sun set. It is tropics and as tropics elsewhere dark descends rapidly: soon the sky is like a jet black canopy studded with extremely big, big like oranges stars as bright as 150 watt carnival electric bulbs. As your ecstatic gaze combs the heavens you notice stars, constellations and galaxies as well as a hundred gracefully shooting stars each almost crying “Look at me, look at me, am I not the most wonderful thing around here?” to you. A surge of emotion puts your heart into overdrive and you shout out “Tabarakallahu ahsan al khaliqin! (Blessed be Allah the Best of Creators!)”. You break down in unbearable happiness and gratitude and uncontrollably sob, shedding felicitous tears as if you are already in paradise and are gazing at the Incomparably Beautiful Countenance of Allah, Whose ever-present dignity is not in the least concealed by His smiling back at you with approval and satisfaction. You feel that you are both the most alive of the living and the most dead of the dead and yet at your happiest ever above which there could be no greater happiness.
Now, please tell me, while in this state is there an offence caused to you which you cannot forgive or is there anything which anybody has asked from you and you will not give? Take this metaphor to see how a true and full saint of Allah feels about the world. A God-filled, God-informed man is a true and full deputy of God; he is a repository of infinite goodwill and grace, oceanic wisdom and magnificent behavioural expertise. As such Allah can entrust him with anything about his servants and this trusteeship consists of prophethood at the top and a Sufi mastership just under it. A Sufi song summarises the position of the true master (repeat, true, because false ones are only too many and too skilful in pretension) and an intending but oft-erring and vacillating disciple who protests his love of the Truth but cannot pay the price:
O nice lover, did I not tell you that you cannot bear our tests
Did I not tell you “This is a morsel of difficult consent, you cannot swallow”
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Yet, those who do not swallow remain helpless
Shedding tears of blood, broken and hopeless
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“This (this physical life) is a moment of opportunity, you cannot arrest it
You cannot enjoy it forever” did I not say?
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“Why not then go the arena and watch the Truth?”
No? “Had I not told you then that you could not put your neck down for the Path to the Truth?”
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You cannot be a dervish, you cannot find the Truth
Unless you arrive at the dargah and unless you reach the guide
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Which means many travellers start on this path but few complete the travel and arrive at the Truth and Reality of Salvation, that of being a true deputy and representative of True God, the Gracious Cherisher of all existence. Completion is facilitated very much by having both fellow travellers and an accomplished guide who has already been ‘There’. That is why we have Sufism and the sheikh, just like the sahaba had their companionship of the way under their guide the Messenger of Allah (S). In fact true Sufism has been an inspired attempt to reproduce the model of ‘the Prophet (S) and his companions’ setup since that model had been so successful within the limits imposed by the inevitable human fallibilities. Fallibilities needed to be and need to be there simply because life is a learning curve which has to start from a zero point and moment and after and through many ups and down will reveal to man his heart’s secrets like how and why he is jealous or greedy and then how to conquer these weaknesses whereupon Allah will open new chapters for him in spiritual maturation exercises. In other words this world is not an earned or deserved holiday but a school we have been pushed into and pressed along, in order that we get as good an education as we can in self-understanding and an apprenticeship in moral and spiritual enlightenment and refinement which products shall qualify us to face death with dignity and equanimity and enjoy its eternal gifts for such well-educated and trained - which gifts make up the Paradise.
The alternative is a life of ignorant and dangerous passion wrecking both the owner and many he comes across in the moral traffic throughout his miserable life; history is mostly made of this bad behavioural traffic record but needed not be had more of us learned to feel and behave better.
So o Sufi, please understand this and try to save yourself while you can. Amen.
17. EXTENSIVE OR INTENSIVE CONQUEST
INTRODUCTION
Conquering others is an obsession for some personality types and they cannot rest and feel alive until they make up their minds and rise to launch a career of making some conquests. There is no harm in this tendency in itself; harm comes when the soul informing the would-be conqueror is less than holy and may even be totally unholy.
The holiest conquest is conquest for the True God where the conqueror is after elevating his and others’ feelings and conduct to nobler and nobler levels. This is what Allah’s prophets and saints following those prophets are made for and good at. Sufi masters are particularly brilliant in this respect since their capital base is no less than that best compendium of guidance called the Qur’an and that master of masters to whom the Qur’an was revealed and explained, namely our master Muhammad alaihi afdalussalatu wassalam.
Outside this worthiest of conquests there are those which are still good to a certain extent and those which are mixed bags and lastly those which are dubious to say the least and plain satanical at worst.
We intend in this lesson to insha Allah discuss these issues so that if and when we are in a mood or have an opportunity for conquest we choose the right target and not be dragged into what may eventually turn out to be a satanic enterprise in a garb of holiness.
CRITERIA FOR CHOOSING OR IDENTIFYING A PROJECT OF CONQUEST WHICH WILL BE RIGHT FOR A MUSLIM BELIEVER
“First things first” is a very wise saying to listen to when one is about to tackle a problem or launch a project.
What is the ‘first thing first’ of a true believer? Let the Lord All-Wise, All-Knowing tell us:
“O believers, your responsibility is firstly to yourselves. Those who go astray cannot do any harm to you once you are on the Right Path” (5: 105).
That means this: You must first conquer yourself, that is to say, you must identify your spiritual and behavioural shortcomings and treat them to the recipes provided by Allah’s Book and His Messengers example. This you can really do under a true spiritual guide like a true Sufi master. Learning is not so much something like a transfer of knowledge from a book to you by reading or listening to a recitation of that book but that and also a transfer of both verbal and non-verbal knowledge from a true master. It is because today’s formal religious instruction is made too academic whereby studying prescribed books and sitting exams on them is everything. The product is a soulless and wisdomless graduate who can just quote from his books for others but can neither internalise the messages contained nor are those messages easy to digest or profound enough to impress.
Let us take the verse we quoted above: is it one thing to read this verse just from the Qur’an (or just listen to it when another person recites it) and quite another to listen to it in a very apt context when another person, a person who looks very much like an embodiment of Allah’s Word, recites it to us and elaborates on it with palpably sincere emotion and, even better, sets the example only too impressively and convincingly? When a prophet or saint recites a message from Allah his whole body language joins in to prove and verify its truth and what is more he is able at all times to act in full obedience to the verse even when he does not remember it let alone pronounce it!
Such a saved person takes care, even without thinking about taking care, of his own conduct as the verse advises- the reason is that the Word has become flesh in him which means Allah’s Verbal Revelations have penetrated his flesh and have set like concrete in him. Read if you wish how Allah describes his great prophet Jesus/Isa alaihissalam:
“Indeed Jesus son of Mary is none other than Allah’s messenger and His Word He cast into Mary and a spirit from Him” (4: 171).
In his capacity as Allah’s Word Incarnate and as a spirit (a will to do Allah’s guidance work among men) he was a CONQUEROR OF HEARTS AND MINDS. Therefore wherever he walked, multitudes followed him and mighty miracles flowed from him. Even the pagan Roman governor Pontius Pilate was impressed and was quite reluctant to condemn such a holy and honest man. He WAS the Christ as the Qur’an repeatedly confirmed and as far as his reality is concerned we Muslims are more entitled to his ownership than the members of other faiths. His frustration has been amply compensated for by the success of his successor Muhammad (S) whose advent he lovingly prophesied under the descriptive name ‘Paraclete’ which is a Greek word meaning ‘one whose help is asked for’. Why our master and the master of all mankind was described as ‘one whose help is asked for’? Inspiration comes to me that because the Christ was eventually frustrated by his contemporaries and was later to be distorted and abused in foreign lands and made into just another mythical and mystical pagan god to Greek and Roman taste, the realisation of his aim of both spiritually elevating people and liberating them from tyranny and abuse needed another, more fortunate and better-endowed saint and prophet whose help would make all the difference, which it did.
What was the Christ (S) and after him Muhammad (S) after? It was conquering ignorance and evil enveloping people by offering them knowledge and light. In other words the project was empowerment through the gnosis of the Truth and guidance by example based on the same gnosis of the Truth. Where the Christ (S) mainly failed, his successor Muhammad (S) helped in realising the aims of the Christ and all prophets before him: he has been the most comprehensively and enduringly successful of all messengers of God- in fact so successful that abruptly after him, the coming of prophets stopped for good. The job has been done once and for all.
The conquest project we have to choose is none other than building upon the success of our master Muhammad (S) and that is based on instilling the True Faith in our hearts and exemplifying its applications in our persons.
THE DILEMMA OF CHOOSING BETWEEN EXTENSIVE AND INTENSIVE CONQUEST
What the Christ personally failed was making an extensive conquest which means spreading one’s influence and imposing one’s authority on a large population over a vast geography. Personally he failed in this. To become the world faith it has been, the teachings and example of the Christ had to be heavily doctored to appeal to both a pagan mind and the widespread mystical tastes then extending over vast areas of the Roman world. Paul sowed the seeds of this popularisation, by paganisation and mysticisation, and others after him built diverse castles of rival dogmatic sects and mystical traditions. Like all exploitative and opportunistic adaptations of a valuable teaching, the sects and traditions so manufactured became commercialised and so do they remain to this day.
We who live in the West not rarely come across advertisements and missionary visitors, some of them very pestilent, who promise us both the heaven and the earth if we just bother to attend one of their meetings. Often miracles are promised and persons who call themselves prophets (can you imagine, prophets of God) are advertised as the able miracle workers. Out of curiosity I have been to a few of such meetings and frankly I was both saddened and nauseated. The believers were incredibly naive cultists wearing typically stupid smiles, those identical ethereal facial expressions as fixed as paper-masks and acting towards their prophet and his or her staff like primary school children would act towards their most favoured teachers. Each loved to take orders and obeying, including coughing up more money or volunteering in recruitments and fund-risings - which in a way gave the game away. Such projects are plainly commercial, with both extremely lucrative profits for the partners-in-deceit and big ego satisfying devices. The ‘prophet’ is a big-mouthed loud orator and physical and musical exercise master who can work up his audience into any kind of frenzy or ecstasy. Not infrequently, financial and sexual favours going to them are exposed, but their hypnotic hold on the most of their followers is such that relatively few will abandon such prophets or gurus even after a total expose ending with the culprit in a court of law and then behind bars. They create a dependency in their clients quite comparable to hard drugs; as a result any de-brainwashing is as difficult as weaning a long-standing drug addict from his drug. In other words the hypnotic suggestions they inject into their sermons and service leaderships, doom their clients to asking for more and paying up more if possible. Not rarely some disciples sell themselves sexually to come up with the sums of money allocated to their share as holy fund-raisers.
Now, this is that kind of conquest which is equally extensive and intensive- the conqueror wants to get as many souls as possible to extend his rule over and to cultivate each soul as intensively as he can, so that the person concerned becomes as docile as possible a subject on the one hand and as productive a milking cow as possible on the other. Upon such strong foundations rise all sorts of exploitative and ever-growing cults and these include many Muslim analogues. All these are very lucrative non-taxpaying businesses and some grow into big multinational companies except in name with many retail outlets, except in name. These retail outlets may be called temples or ashrams, for example. As such, these commercial enterprises disguised as religious or esoteric, equally aim at building up a reliable, loyal or addicted clientele to ensure the greatest possible turnover, and in so doing need to pursue both an expansive and extensive cultivation of vulnerable people.
You know, not everybody is vulnerable.